The Long Flight Over
by DownWithBananafish
Summary: Having only just escaped "the heart of the Combine," Nurse Ratched's former patients try to rebuild their lives around the events of McMurphy's stay in the ward.


"Dale Harding," he tells the little nurse when she asks his name, and strides out the doors a few steps ahead of Vera, feeling like the bravest man in the world. All the way home, his slender hands clench the wheel of the station wagon she bought while he was away and really he couldn't care less, not now, not even when she tells him without so much as a feeble attempt at apology that she's been living with someone else since the day he left, and that she'd be filing for a divorce as soon as he felt up to helping her with the paperwork. "Maybe you should rest a little," she says, condescending as all hell. "The loony bin can't have agreed with you, dear, you're such a fragile creature to begin with."

Ordinarily a remark like that would have stung like a hornet, and he'd have been ready with some kind of biting, witty epithet to put her in her place, but now he finds he doesn't really care. Not now. Not when his life is just beginning.

(Two nights later it hits him, and he spends the next eight hours moving out of his and Vera's house, because if there's one thing he's learned from McMurphy it's that you can't dwell on the things that hurt. Within four days he's found an old school friend of his with a vacant spare bedroom and there he stays, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by stacks upon stacks of literature-his foreign language textbooks from college and some Great Russian Novels and seven different translations of Aristotle, and a literary study of Marcel Proust and a teetering heap of Shakespearean biography and Dickens and Austen and Longinus, and it's all so, so, so useless. The fact that he's wasted his life picking apart the minds of dead men, dead men whose revelations are next to nothing in the harsh new light of Nurse Ratched's electrotherapy machine, sickens him. Within six months he has moved across the country and, at the age of thirty-one, is at last ready to face whatever life has in store for him.)

Bromden begins to make a habit of speaking.

First it's to the Mexican man who gives him ten bucks for food and a jacket to hide the fact that he's essentially a fugitive ("Thank you," he says to him, reminded forcefully of the first time he'd spoken to McMurphy, and is met with an unexpected smile), and then it's the others he hitches rides from: "I'm going to see the salmon," he tells one truck driver, but doesn't bother to elaborate. "I grew up there," he explains to someone else, and is struck by how familiar his own voice sounds, even though it's almost as alien to him as it is to the strangers he speaks to.

(Eventually he does make it back home, but he doesn't stay for long. Everything has changed, and not in a good way-in the way that for a moment he's almost sure he's found the wrong place. Except you don't forget where you were born, and you sure as hell don't forget where you saw the Combine for the first time. Finally, discouraged, he sends a sad salute towards the salmon of his dreams, slowly being poisoned in a river that once was clear.)

After that, he doesn't know where to go.

He hitches another ride, this time eastward, and chats amiably with the driver, all the time reciting under his breath the rhyme his grandmother taught him: One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest. It makes him very sad, for some reason, and he feels compelled to drown it out somehow.

"Eastward bound," he tells the driver loudly, who nods once, slowly, and keeps looking over his shoulder every minute or so for the rest of the ride.

Harding is driving along a deserted road somewhere on the outskirts of the city, in a car he borrowed from a friend. (He has lots of friends, he knows, but none of them knew McMurphy. None of them remember the day he came out of that room, eyes black, face blank as a corpse's, because the Combine finally wore him down. None of them can understand why he went in that room in the first place, and none of them will see Billy Bibbit's face floating in midair every time they close their eyes. They were trapped in their own wards somewhere, with their own nurses and shock treatments and Billy Bibbits and McMurphys, and some of them still haven't left.)

Out the window he glimpses the outstretched thumb of a hitchhiker. Distracted, he pulls over, opens the door to find a monstrously tall man in a leather jacket leaning in. "May I have a ride?" the man inquires politely, and Harding can't help but think how familiar he looks, almost like somebody he knew in the ward.

He shakes it off. He's been preoccupied of late (more than usual), and he knows better than anyone that nerves can wreak havoc with the mind. And besides which, Chief Broom was never that tall, never that confident, never that loud. Race is the only linking factor between the two.

They drive along in silence for a while. Then the stranger says, conversationally, in a voice that Harding knows he's never heard before, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

He whips around. "Excuse me?" The stranger is looking at him, dead serious, eyes deep and dark and unfathomable and suddenly Harding is struck by a wave of nausea. He's seeing things. He's seeing and hearing things that aren't there. Freedom has taken its toll already.

The stranger continues. "You look kind of like a guy I used to know. You're different, though. He used to have his hands set between his knees all the time, so no one could see. Yours are up on the steering wheel." His voice is slow and measured and deep, the kind of voice you want to trust. It's not the kind of voice Broom would have, if he ever spoke.

Harding watches him warily. "Where are you going?" he says at last.

The man looks surprised. "I don't know," he replies. "You?"

"No idea."

They continue the ride in silence, and when his passenger begins to make small talk in that lovely bass voice of his, Harding decides the hell with it, maybe it is Bromden. He could be back in the ward still, hallucinating from some awful drug the nurses pushed down his throat, but he's here all the same, and old Chief Bromden isn't over with the rest of the Accutes but in the backseat of a car driving out of upstate Ohio, thinking and speaking like a perfectly rational human being. It could be either, decides Harding, flexing his fingers on the wheel.

After all, he thinks, glancing back for another look, it's the truth even if it didn't happen.


End file.
